Factors of 20

Let’s say that you won $20 from a lottery scratch off. You cash it in and want to share this instant winning money with your friends. You need to share it equally. That means you want to keep an equal amount of money and share equally the rest with your 3 friends. Can you do that?

Actually, you can. This has to do with the factors of 20. There are a certain number of factors that the number 20 has. We need to see if four is a factor of 20. The best way to go about doing this is to find all of the factors of 20. Then we will know the amount that each person including yourself will get from the $20 split.

Factors of 20 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20

First, we need to look at the number 20. How can we break down 20? Think about what number can evenly go into 20 without having a remainder. The best way to do that with an even number is to divide it by two.

That is the great thing about finding factors of even numbers. They always have the number 2 as a factor. So, let’s start there. Look at the visual below. This shows you the factors of 20.

This diagram shows you the factors of 20 with money. To start, the 20 dollar-bill at the top means that two factors of 20 are, of course, 1 and itself, 20.

Then there are two other sets of factors. Two and ten are factors of 20 because when you multiply two times ten, you get twenty. Then also, you have four five-dollar bills. This means that both five and four are factors of 20.

How do we know if we have all of the factors of 20? The best way is to go through each number to see if we are missing factors. So far, we have 1 and 20, 2 and 10, and 4 and 5 as factors. Look at 3. Does 3 evenly divide into 20 without having a remainder?

No, if 3 was divided into 20, we would have a remainder of 2 because 3 times 6 equals 18 with a remainder of 2. We can also rule out 6 because of what we found out before with the number three. Six times three is 18, so we would have a remainder.

On we go. Seven cannot be divided into 20 evenly because 7 times 3 is 21. Seven times 2 is 14. There would definitely be a remainder. Eight and 9 are also not factors of 20. There are remainders for both of these.

We do not need to go any further than that because once we get the highest factor other than the number itself, you can stop. So, 10 is the biggest.

Therefore, our factors for 20 are the following:

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